Making a difference to the next release

With the 1st alpha build of the new, upcoming XenServer release (codenamed "Ely") as announced byAndy Melmed's blogon the 11th October– Ithought it'd be useful to provide a little retrospective on how you, the xenserver.org community, have helpedgetting itoff to a great start by providing great feedback on previous alphas, betas and releases -and how this has been used to strengthen the codebase for Ely as a whole based on your experiences.

AsI amsure you are well aware - community users of xenserver.org can make use of the incident tracking database atbugs.xenserver.org to raise issues on recent alphas, betas and XenServer releases to raise issues or problems they've found on their hardware or configuration. These incidents are raised in the form ofXSO tickets which can then be commented upon by other members of the community and folks who work on the product.

We listened

Looking back on all of the XSO tickets raised on the latest 7.0 release - these total more than 200 individual incident reports. I want to take the time to thank everyone who contributed to these, often detailed, specific, constructive reports, and for working iteratively to understand more of the underlying issues. Some of these investigations are ongoing, and need further feedback, but many of them are sufficiently clear to move forward to the next step.

We understood

The incident reports were triaged and, by working with the user community, more than 80% of them have been processed. Frequently this involved questions and answers to get a better handle on what was the underlying problem. Then trying a change to the configuration or even a private fix to see and confirm if it related to the problem or resolved it. The enthusiasm and skill of the reportershasbeen amazing, and continually useful. At this point - we've separated the incidents into those which can be fixed as bugs, and those which are requests for features. The latter have been provided to Citrix product management for consideration.

We did

Out of these which can be fixed as bugs, we raised or updated 45 acknowledged defects in XenServer. More than 70% of these are already fixed - with another 20% being actively worked on. The small remainder are blocked for some reason and awaiting a change elsewhere in the product, upstream or in our ability to test. The 70% of fixes have now successfully eitherbecomepart of some of the hotfixes which have been released for 7.0,orare in the codebase already and are being progressively released as part of the Ely alpha programme for the community to try.

So what's next? With work continuing apace on Ely - we have now opened the "Ely alpha" as aaffects-version in the incident database to raise issues with this latest build. At the same time - in the spirit of continuing to progressively improve the actively developing codebase - we have removed the 6.5 SP1 affects-version – so folks can focus onthe new release.

Finally - on behalf of all xenserver.org users - my personal thanks to everyone who has helped improve both Dundee and Ely - both by reporting incidents, triaging and fixing them and by continuing to give your feedback on the latest new version. This really makes a difference to all members of the community.

About the author

Andrew Halley 1st encountered virtual systems at CERN before going onto to be a heavy user of globally distributed Linux systems for research analysis. Moving from academia to industry he then developed software for mobile protocol stacks and applications frameworks before switching to running global projects and software teams. These have ranged from cellular, and GPS to secure communications for emergency services and now (full-circle!) into the work of virtualised IT and Cloud infrastructure with Citrix XenServer Development.

"Our job is to accommodate all the faculties’ needs as much as possible so we needed to find a solution that could support a large number of applications as well as save storage space and staff resources. This is where Citrix stepped in."

Jose ChanHead of IT DepartmentMacau Polytechnic Institute

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